"Gifts from the Child Within" delicately guides readers through the healing steps of Re-Creation Therapy, a method Sinor has used for years with positive results in her own private practice. The book is refreshingly flexible: readers can use it to heal from traumatic events-from childhood or the more recent past-independently, or it can be used as a tool in conjunction with professional therapy. Re-Creation Therapy involves seven healing steps: acknowledgment, self-awareness, meeting the child within, emotional release exercises, re-framing the traumatic event, forgiveness and letting go.

“Gifts from the Child Within: Self-discovery and Self-recovery Through Re-Creation Therapy, 2nd Edition” is a recovery workbook written for both survivors of childhood abuse and the counselors that work with them. It helps readers discover how childhood trauma has caused emotional suffering in their lives today. For me, personally, it gave me a better understanding of how past events from my childhood had a tremendous impact upon my personal relationships today. The author Barbara Sinor, PhD, has had extensive professional experience in dealing in this area. She also has her own personal history of having been abused as a child. She uses self-disclosure to present some very powerful examples about her own healing. Both her personal and professional experiences validate her knowledge in this area.

Sinor offers a paradigm for empowering yourself or a client to resolve their problems by working with body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Sinor states, “Today there are signs that after a long and tumultuous courtship, spirituality and psychology may be finding common ground.” Connecting all of these aspects of oneself leads to a holistic approach to healing. She encourages the person in recovery to proceed at their own pace for healing. She does not believe that it should be forced upon anyone. She says, “Each individual must proceed through his\her life discoveries, or in therapeutic intervention at one’s own rate with one’s own sense of how things are and with one’s own resolutions.”

She teaches you how to get in touch with your inner child to release negative emotions and recreate childhood beliefs and experiences. To learn to live in the moment, you must learn to let go of the past. “You can learn to live in the present by releasing the retained hurt and not allowing it to direct your life. You can accomplish this by using self-empowerment, by acknowledging your personal power.”

There are seven key steps to the process: Acknowledgement; Self-Awareness; Meeting Your Child Within; Emotional Release Exercises; The Re-Creation Process; For-Giving; and Letting Go. Each step is fully explained in its own chapters. For deeper exploration, at the end of each chapter are thought-provoking Child Within exercises, affirmations, directions for autohypnosis and blank pages for journaling. By using these tools to recreate your past, you will be able to change your present reality and alter your future.

“Gifts from the Child Within” is an incredibly powerful healing tool. By using the exercises, I gained some incredible insight into how my past has tremendously affected me today. I learned things about myself that I had never realized before. I am truly grateful to Dr. Sinor for writing this incredible book. I also appreciate that she shared her own personal experiences. By doing so, I knew that she really could relate to what she was writing about.